Having recently officially retired (and getting a large payout yesterday of my remaining unused leave credits), you would think that buying a new suit would be the last thing on my mind. After all, I hate wearing suits, and the two suits I bought from Peter Jackson back in 2002 (to celebrate a promotion at …
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Oops….
search.app/PSRHc9fQR33M557d8 It’s interesting to see political incompetence in action so poetically. Insiders know that Richard Shields is the brother of former Victorian liberal party state director Julian Sheezel. Cain is not expected to be the keeper of Abel, but obviously one is much more capable than the other. I think that the people who stopped …
The Australian Olympic Team – Where Too Much Ain’t Enough
The Olympics are over, and I hope that we as a nation-state have sated our gluttony for gold medals for a few months at least. After all, we did win 18 of those at these Olympics, the most we have ever won in history, coming fourth in the tally behind the USA, China, and Japan …
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Pass The Dutchie?
Back in 1982, a band of teenaged British Jamaicans had a world wide hit with a soft reggae song titled ‘Pass The Dutchie’. It was quite a silly song (I quite like reggae usually, particularly ‘Is this love?’ and ‘No Woman No Cry’) and did not really deserve much notice or to be a number …
The Great American Nightmare? The Ongoing Relevance of Sinclair Lewis
The American Dream is a phrase which was first articulated in that form in 1931, at the heart of the Great Depression. I suppose that there are some parallels between that time and now. James Truslow Adams, the populariser of the phrase, defined the American Dream as ‘a land in which life should be better …
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Secularism, Sectarianism, and Australian Democracy
The decision last week by Western Australian first term Senator Fatima Payman to resign from the Labor Party two years into her six year term and sit (for now) on the cross benches as a result of her stance on the Palestinian state issue has caused a problem for the Labor Party and an ironic …
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Will Artificial Intelligence Eliminate Wine Critics First?
I never have quite binged on Evelyn Waugh’s novels, which is probably a good thing. I was 15 when I first read Decline and Fall, which I loved, but then was disappointed by his second novel, Vile Bodies. I suppose that 15 year olds do not quite get the irony and the self-deprecating social commentary …
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The Disney Star Wars: When Fan Fiction Gets Out Of Control
Ever since my Grade 4 teacher read The Hobbit to my class back in 1978, I have been a fan of Tolkien. I have lost track of the number of times I have read both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, and I have read The Silmarillion three times (most recently after many …
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$180 Million Flop? Funding Film to Promote Art and Culture….
As I wrote a few days ago, I quite enjoyed Furiosa, the Mad Max spin off film. Sadly, it appears to have been a flop, which is quite sad as I have always loved Mad Max, and the Roadrunner cartoons (which are the perfect manifestation of this genre). News reports have emerged that the Australian …
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Reddit – The Rebirth of Greek Tragedy as a Social Media Trainwreck
It took me quite a while to ‘get’ King Lear. Whilst familiar with Macbeth from high school English class, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest from having read them independently in my teenage years [my initial copy of the Complete Works – I now own four (all unsurprisingly gifted to me) plus separate paperbacks of …
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Lost For Words! 